Traffic Spotting

When it comes to daily tasks such as monitoring network traffic, administrators should choose a tool that is sufficiently functional and not too complicated.

Today, I’m talking about a task that isn’t exactly a big thrill for most administrators: providing human-readable statistics for traffic on a network interface. For this task, I recently discovered pktstat [1] in the course of searching for a compromise between the monosyllabic IPTraf and the verbose Wireshark. Pkstat is included by most distributions, and the source code is available online.